


peel the scars from off my back

by citadelofswords



Series: the deserter's song (the pacific rim au) [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pacific Rim (2013), Young Avengers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Temporary Character Death, i'm never sure how to tag these kinds of fics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 09:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5962684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citadelofswords/pseuds/citadelofswords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky had wished that he could have fled the Shatterdome and forgotten about everything he went through there. But saving the world didn’t automatically mean it went back to normal. Or at least some semblance of normal; a normalcy that meant Bucky lived with a dull throb in his chest stemming from missing the man who had always meant the most to him, all his life. He had been prepared to deal with it before he realized that the Hong Kong team would be expected to go on press tours, travel the world to meet the families of pilots who had died fighting Kaiju, and be interrogated-- interviewed-- on every single detail of the process of Drifting, fighting Kaiju, and (most importantly for the tabloids) what the hell Bucky had been up to for the last fifteen years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	peel the scars from off my back

**Author's Note:**

> Fifteen months after the publication of the original Pacific Rim AU, I finally give you... not a sequel. I just couldn't force another full-length sequel out of everything. So this is a coda. The chronological end of the verse. I'll probably finish up the companion fics I have sitting in my drive, and I still want to figure out how to work in Cindy Moon and Matt Murdock.
> 
> But here's your ending. Sorry about the cliffhanger I left for a year.
> 
> Title from "Welcome Home" by Radical Face. Keeping with the theme.

Everyone who knew anyone in Brooklyn knew about the Barnes boy. He’d been the darling of the town even before the Kaiju War left him a hero. And Brooklyn never betrayed their own.

As such, Bucky’s court case was quietly attended by one hundred upstanding young men and women who patiently attested to his character on the stand. Sam Wilson, who bore no shame in the posters of Freedom Howl stuck on the inside of his closet door in his childhood home in New Jersey, spoke long and hard about what it was like to share headspace with a man like Bucky Barnes.

In the end, however, it was Natasha’s testimony that had everyone shaking their heads and shouting for Bucky’s acquittal. There was nothing quite like the details of monstrosity that could so viciously change public opinion.

And everyone mourned for Bucky. “So sad,” they murmured, gazing on his third floor apartment. “Lost his best friend in that last stand. They say he sacrificed himself to get Bucky out.”

“Best friend,” some scoffed. “Partner. Soulmate, more like. Rogers and Barnes. Jane, what did I tell you? Those boys would be together forever, til death did they part.”

“Well, death did part them.”

Bucky heard that conversation while he made coffee one morning. Beast pushed her head under his metal hand. He scratched her behind her ears, took a long drink, and quietly latched his window shut. It was November. The chill in the morning was getting to be too much.

 

* * *

 

Sam and Natasha brought the baby over every day that the three of them had to work. Bucky supposed that Irina was the best thing to ever happen to their shambles of a family-- she kept Bucky sane and in the loop, and she never failed to bring a smile to his face. She had the best of both Clint and Nat, Bucky thought idly, one day while he watched her pick at the plating on his arm.

She’d been born while Bucky had been in holding. Natasha had brought him photographs of her.

“You’re the godfather,” she said, firmly. “It would have been Steve.”

“So I’m second best?” he joked, and her lips got tighter around the corners.

“No,” she told him, and that was that.

 

* * *

 

Bucky often wondered if they blamed him for Steve’s death at the bottom of the Pacific. He blamed himself, certainly, but he figured they had every right to blame him too. After all, he’d spent a month or more with them, and clearly forged bonds strong enough that everyone had been shaken when Bucky had returned to the Shatterdome alone.

Bucky had wished that he could have fled the Shatterdome and forgotten about everything he went through there. But saving the world didn’t automatically mean it went back to normal. Or at least some semblance of normal; a normalcy that meant Bucky lived with a dull throb in his chest stemming from missing the man who had always meant the most to him, all his life. He had been prepared to deal with it before he realized that the Hong Kong team would be expected to go on press tours, travel the world to meet the families of pilots who had died fighting Kaiju, and be interrogated-- interviewed-- on every single detail of the process of Drifting, fighting Kaiju, and (most importantly for the tabloids) what the hell Bucky had been up to for the last fifteen years.

 

* * *

 

There had been one memorable tour in Tokyo when Bucky had given up on everything. He could handle the stares. He could handle the distrustful gazes, the loud comments from children about his metal arm, and the interviewers asking him about the Winter Soldier. What he could not handle were his friends trying to redirect the questions away from the Winter Soldier and questions about Steve. And the reporters in Tokyo had been insistent on details of every pilot’s personal life.

After listening to Natasha haltingly evade questions, he lost his patience. “Do you want to hear about the Winter Soldier?” he snapped, in perfect Japanese. “I’m not afraid to tell you about what I did.”

Fury had looked at him warningly, but he’d pressed on. “I’m to blame. America can lock me up for the rest of my life, execute me, whatever the fuck they want to do. I killed people. I killed my own friends. I killed my best friend, and my best friend’s girl, and I killed a child’s parents. But it happened. Trying to avoid the truth is going to help no one.”

There had been a clamor for details, and Bucky could remember, very vividly, a girl in the back hopping onto her chair and addressing Tony directly. “Mr. Stark! Since Sergeant Barnes has just admitted to the murder of your parents, would you like to say how you feel about that knowledge, knowing that your father was murdered by the man who was once his best friend?”

Bucky thought he mostly remembered her because she hadn’t sounded like she wanted to implicate him in anything. She sounded like she was genuinely curious. Tony must have thought so too, because he’d given a genuine answer. With, like, details. Not evading anything. Straight and to the point.

This is how it had happened.

“Shut up, all of you,” he had snapped, dragging the table mic closer to his face. “You all want to hear this, right? If I forgave the man who killed my parents?” The reporters had all quieted down and sat back, except for the girl who had spoken, who was still standing. “I spent eight years believing that my parents’ death had been an accident.” Tony began. “When I found out their death had been murder, I was… relieved, to say the least. That there was someone to blame. That my father was a better man than he had led me to believe. That he hadn’t been drinking and flying with my mother in the cockpit. 

“And I thought… I thought that I could never forgive the Winter Soldier. Forgive Bucky. For taking my parents away from me, when they were so young, when they were still desperately searching. I thought to myself, This is how you repay your friends who are devoting their lives to trying to recover your body? By  _ murdering _ them?” Tony had looked over at Bucky then, and Bucky’s left hand clenched tightly, but he held his gaze. “But Steve… Steve believed so strongly that Bucky wasn’t himself. Steve wanted me to see it too. And I wanted to believe that Bucky, that  _ my godfather _ , wasn’t himself, that the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes were two separate people, corrupted by HYDRA and Russia. That  _ Bucky  _ would never have killed my parents. And knowing that Peggy was a trigger word… that Bucky would remember whenever they spoke Peggy’s name… it helped.”

“So  _ have _ you forgiven Bucky Barnes for the murder of your parents, his friends?” another reporter had asked, with wide, eager eyes.

“No,” Tony had said. “I haven’t. Because  _ Bucky Barnes _ didn’t kill my parents. Bucky Barnes would never have harmed a hair on my mother’s head. And no matter how hard he wanted to punch Howard for breaking Steve’s heart, sometimes, he would never have murdered him. No. Bucky was a tool. A  _ weapon _ . It was Alexander Pierce who murdered my parents, and used Bucky, and Bucky’s talent in the Drift, against him.”

That had caused a stir; Pierce was a national hero, and Barnes was a traitor. They cited Tony’s allegation in the trial.

Fury pulled up security footage, and so when Bucky had been acquitted, they also posthumously charged Pierce with several counts of murder, manslaughter, treason, and some other things Bucky couldn’t remember. His favorite charge was one juror standing up and shouting, “He also had an outstanding parking ticket for parking in the President’s spot at the Congress building,” which Bucky hadn’t even known was a thing, but later made him laugh until he cried.

 

* * *

 

Bucky started working odd jobs to give his hands something to do. He quietly refused Tony’s money, but continued to use the platinum credit card Steve had left in his drawer just before the final showdown.

He got a job at a coffeeshop and pulled gloves up over the metal of his arm. Most of his customers were tired college students who gave him a fistbump as they stumbled away; the others were veterans and middle-aged women who’d been teenagers during the robotics boom. No one called him a war hero; or at least, they didn’t call him one to his face. To them he was Bucky, that nice young man who made excellent coffees and stared out the window when he thought no one was looking.

It wasn’t the worst reputation in the entire world.

 

* * *

 

So now Bucky’s life was: wake up, hope the day was an Irina day, watch television if it wasn’t, hope they gave him a shift at work, have dinner with one of the other Avengers (a nickname for the crew of Jaeger pilots who had closed the Breach coined by the press and enthusiastically adopted by Sam and Tony), make sure Beast was fed, go back to sleep. Saturdays was movie night at Stark Tower. Sundays Bucky taught the younger pilots (“The Young Avengers,” Billy had said proudly, once, eyes shining as he looked at Wanda) more basic hand-to-hand and took them out for ice cream.

It was a good life. But Bucky still missed Steve every fucking day.

He knew that not living would be worse than anything else, though. He knew that Steve hadn’t died at the bottom of the ocean for Bucky to spend all his time moping. He used his energy during the day to smile and laugh and spent his nights lying awake replaying the final battle in his mind, trying to think if there was any way he could have changed things.

Clint had come over once. Not that he hadn’t come over since, but there had been one significant time, where they’d sat down and watched the game, but he couldn’t remember what game because at some point Bucky had muted it and said, “What was it like, working with him at the Shatterdome?”

He had expected the same responses he had gotten from Sam and Natasha and Tony. Silence, vague responses, and coaxing away from the topic. But Clint had met his gaze steadily.

“Brilliant,” he said, finally. “I mean, we were working with our hero. You know, you dream about being able to work with the people you admire, but it never measures up to the real thing.”

“You found him, right?”

“Yeah. Oh my god, that’s a crazy story. But, uh, later. I found him, yes. It was unbelievable, you know, staring down at this guy who’d been missing for fourteen years, carefully preserved in ice. It was like looking into the past.”

“Was he… was he different?”

Clint had snorted at that. “Buck, I was eleven at the peak of your Jaeger career. I don’t recall what he was like on the TV when I watched your press reports. I mean, he seemed sadder. He was depressed to all hell thinking you were dead. When he found out you were the Soldier, it was like… it was like someone had breathed life back into him. Like he hadn’t had a purpose, and was planning on retreating back into the ice once he’d helped save the world, before you came around. And suddenly you were there… Aw, hell. He coulda described it better.”

It helped. “It helps,” he had said, and Clint had brightened somewhat.

 

* * *

 

The Young Avengers frequented the coffee shop every now and then when they had a spare moment, all coming in in a huge clump and laughing together. They were all in school, squashed together in two apartments in Brooklyn and studying hard. Most of them kept talk of the war inside the gym where he coached them, and only Billy would ask him how he was coping, “because Mom asked me to, and you don’t say no to my mom.”

Bucky liked Rebecca Kaplan. He saw her once a week or so as well, when she came into the store and he took his lunch break to talk to her. The therapy sessions had been court ordered for several months, but he liked talking to her. She’d been far enough on the outside to have not been caught up in the war politics, but close enough to understand the impact of Drifting on a man’s brain.

And she’d talked to Steve. She wouldn’t tell Bucky anything about it, and Bucky would never have dreamed of breaking doctor-patient confidentiality, but it helped him to know Steve had been able to talk to someone when everyone he’d ever known had been gone.

 

* * *

 

Bucky remembered Natasha’s testimony from the trial the best.

“Natasha Romanov, you were a member of the Red Room program, correct?”

There had been a murmur from the crowd, but Natasha just lifted her chin and said, “Yes. I was.”

“Part of the single pilot program?”

“I was… young. But yes, they tried.”

“Explain the process.”

Natasha had folded her hands. “They began with partner drifting,” she had began. “Until a certain age. We started young, younger than the American armies would allow. Normally at ten or eleven. I started at thirteen. They put… they put the Winter Soldier in charge of us. As our handler, of a sort.”

“You showed an aptitude for the Drift?”

“Yes. They tried me drifting with the Winter Soldier, at first.” Clint had shifted uncomfortably in his seat; Bucky noticed only his movements of the Avengers in attendance. “After that, he began trying to protect me. Allowed me to know his name. What he called himself in private." Natasha had smiled. They’d made eye contact. "James."

"There is footage of you calling him Vanya."

"The Russian men called him that. Thought it was a heroic name."

"Were you in love with him?"

Natasha had hesitated. "Yes. But it was the love of a fourteen year old girl who hadn't been shown a shred of kindness in many years. He did not see me as anything except perhaps a little sister."

"Your Honor, this is meaningless and, frankly, biased."

"Objection sustained. Get to your point."

"Miss Romanov--,"

"If you're going to do that, you may as well call me Mrs. Wilson. I'm a married woman."

"Mrs. Wilson, then. Is it possible that your view of the situation may be skewed based on your previous attachment to the Winter Soldier?"

"None at all."

There had been another murmur. The prosecutor had looked troubled. 

"No further questions, your Honor."

Jennifer had stood and approached Natasha. Bucky liked Jennifer. She knew which questions to ask to get the information she wanted, and she was damn good at her job. "You never finished discussing the process of becoming a single pilot in a Jaeger."

Bucky and Clint had both tensed up. Natasha's eyebrows had furrowed. "No, I didn't," she had said, guardedly.

"At your leisure, then."

Natasha had stared at Jennifer for a long moment, and then she looked down. “I never finished the process. But Yelena did.” At Jennifer’s blank look, Natasha straightened. “She was my official co-pilot at the beginning of my process. She found solace in me that sixteen year old girls in the Red Room rarely found. I was mostly ignored by the elder pilots because of James’ interference. Mostly. She was… not.”

Bucky had expected a pin to drop and startle the jury, all who were leaning forwards. Even the prosecutor had looked enraptured.

“My relationship with Yelena is besides the point. One day, I was wandering the Room when I stumbled upon a chamber that I wasn’t meant to. The next step in the process, after numbing the mind to the Drift, is to numb the mind to… to everything else. Memories, emotions, everything. Permanently locking it away so that it can’t escape.”

“It works?”

“Oh, yes.” Natasha had said. “Not for everyone. The suspicion was that some people’s minds were merely too strong, but Barnes has one of the strongest minds I know. I suspect they injected him with some form of serum to weaken him… but I don’t know his story. I’ll let him tell it.”

(Bucky had not known the story himself. Someone had shown up on the second to last day of trial with mountains of empirical evidence that displayed the horrors of the Red Room to the world. No one knew who had turned over the evidence to Jennifer; he had refused to give his name and disappeared back into the ether. With the papers in hands and the whole of Brooklyn behind him, the jury had acquitted him on all the charges.)

“But the blockings?”

“They were also injections. I watched them inject Yelena with one. Each injection takes place over a period of… months. One per week, in order to stop the brain from sensing something is wrong.”

“There must be a way to reverse the effects.”

“Oh, yes. Every mind has trigger words. Something that binds it back to reality. You say the words and it conjures up an image-- a familiar face, a beloved dog, a comforting place. It can be bad; you’ll see it in veterans who have PTSD and they hear a gunshot or a specific sound and their body engages as though they need to duck for cover. But it isn’t always. You have video surveillance footage of Barnes breaking free when they told him he needed to kill Peggy Carter. They never dared speak Steve’s name to him, because they knew that their bond was strong because of the Drift, and they knew it was likely to drag Bucky out from the prison they’d trapped his memories in… but they didn’t know about his relationship with Agent Carter.”

“So, the injections. They made the person… not themselves?”

“To put it frankly, they made the person less than human. Mindless. Almost a robot. Easier to handle the Drift that way.”

The room had exploded in mutters. The jury had looked horrified. Jennifer had just looked smug.

“No further questions, your Honor.”

Bucky thought wryly to himself, sometimes, that even if the mysterious paper man had never delivered his evidence, Natasha’s testimony would have been enough to get him off.

 

* * *

 

A year after the Tokyo press conference, Bucky woke up to find his headspace thrumming harder than it had before. That same day, Steve showed up.

Bucky went into the kitchen and there he was, under the arch, watching Bucky with wide eyes. Bucky didn’t let himself stop, just drew himself up and moved to the sink. He shouldn’t have been so surprised, except he was. He’d expected the hallucination to come much earlier.

“You’re late,” he said.

Steve laughed, choked. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I expected you last year,” Bucky said, pulling out a frying pan. Eggs were a good breakfast. He hadn’t had eggs in a while. “After Tokyo. During the trial, even.”

“I was there for the trial,” Steve said, and hold on. “Who do you think brought them all that paperwork?”

Bucky dropped the frying pan. There was a single (long) moment where he had no idea if he was going to pass out or not, and then the frying pan landed on his toe and he sprang back to awareness with a yelp of pain. There was a cat’s screech as poor Beast, who’d been sunbathing in the window, started out of a doze.

“Bucky?” Steve asked, and his hands were suddenly on Bucky’s shoulders to help him balance, probably, and they were warm and solid.  _ Okay, so, not a hallucination. Got it. _ Well, if they could both be fished out of the ocean once, twice in Steve’s case, there was no reason why Steve couldn’t have crawled out of the ocean a third fucking time.

Steve laughed. “I’m glad we both seem to have accepted the ridiculousness of our lives.”

“I said that out loud?” Bucky managed, and then, “You fucker. Where have you  _ been _ ?”

“Russia, for a while,” Steve replied. “Followed the paper trail. I had to try and help any way I could. I thought you would have guessed. I thought you wouldn’t have wanted to see me.”

“I didn’t  _ guess _ , that’s giving me too much credit. And of course I would have wanted to see you,” Bucky said, and his hands came up to grip Steve’s upper arms, forgetting the pain in his foot for a moment. “You didn’t let me say anything in Howler before you knocked me out. Fuck me, you didn’t even leave me anything in your  _ will _ .”

“I thought I was going to die,” Steve said. “I didn’t want to hear what you had to say. I didn’t want to die with any regrets.”

“And did you?”

Steve paused for a moment. “I was gonna regret not being able to go on the press tours with you,” he said. “I was gonna regret not meeting Nat’s daughter. But most importantly, I was going to regret not being able to see you in your army dress uniform at Stark’s annual galas.”

“Are you  _ objectifying me _ ?” Bucky asked, and Steve smiled so huge that Bucky had to kiss his snarky face. And he’d only intended it to last for a moment, since they had an entire year and a half to catch up on, but then Steve yanked him closer and wrapped his arms around Bucky’s waist. Bucky resigned himself to his fate and kissed Steve again and again, until Steve got winded and Bucky remembered that he might have broken his toe on the cast iron frying pan, and they ended up on the couch while Steve poked at Bucky’s foot and Bucky winced.

“I think it’s just a bruise,” Steve said. “I think you’re okay.”

“Does Nat know?” Bucky gestured at Steve’s body and Steve’s mouth quirked into a smile without quite looking at him.

“Yes, and Sam, but Clint doesn’t, and neither do Tony or the kids.” Steve grimaced. “I should tell Tony eventually. He’s going to wonder who dug up the dirt on Howard.”

“You dug up dirt on  _ Howard _ ?”

“By mistake! It was in the files that HYDRA used to explain why he needed to die. Most of it isn’t true, but they got some things right. Peggy’s file was all bullshit. So was mine, actually.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“You love me,” Bucky said, and Steve looked stricken for a moment. “Sorry,” Bucky said quickly, and realized Steve’s hands were trembling against his feet, where he was still holding them. “Did I say the wrong thing?”

“No,” Steve said. “I’m just… I’m not used to you knowing. I’m not used to you being alive and remembering me, either, but I’ve known you were for a lot longer.”

“We’ll adjust,” Bucky said. “We’ll have to, I mean, because--,”  _ neither of us are quite okay yet _ , he didn’t say. Because Bucky still had nightmares about going down in Howler and HYDRA, and he was still seeing Rebecca Kaplan, and he was sure that Steve was still seeing a therapist somewhere and would still wake up in cold sweats, he didn’t say. “But we’ll have each other. Right?”

Steve reached forwards and took Bucky’s hands. His hands stopped shaking when Bucky closed his metal fingers around them. “Yeah,” he said.

“By the way, since you didn’t let me finish in Howler,” Bucky said, and Steve leaned forwards and kissed him.

“I knew,” Steve said, and Bucky grinned.

 

* * *

 

Something about Steve’s memory must have been messed up by almost drowning twice, because Natasha decidedly not know that Steve was still alive.

She arrived to drop the baby off and Steve opened the door. He had exactly two moments to marvel at how much motherhood suited her and how much her daughter looked like Clint before she quietly said, “Bucky, please take the baby from me,”

“Are you going to punch him?” Bucky asked, and took the little girl out of Natasha’s hands.

“Yes,” Natasha said, and punched Steve, hard, and cursed at him in long winded Russian, and the punched him again, and then said, “If you do that to me again, I’ll kill you myself,” before hugging him tightly around the middle.

“I thought I’d told you,” Steve said, when he had his breath back. “Or, no, wait, I’d thought it was obvious.”

“I don’t hope, Rogers,” Natasha said. “I’m usually disappointed.”

Sam also hadn’t figured it out, evidently, as he showed up a few hours later and yelled, “I cannot BELIEVE you, you fucking asshole,” loudly enough that Bucky placed his hand very gently over Irina’s ears. But Sam wrapped Steve in a hug, and Natasha slipped between the two of them to clutch at Steve’s lower back tightly enough Steve felt joints creak. 

Then Clint was coming through the door and saying “HA! I knew it!” and the five of them settled down on the couch, Steve holding Irina against his chest and asking them about their lives, and Sam and Clint were practically tripping over themselves to show off Natasha’s wedding band-- “She got all snarky at the trial, going ‘You can call me Mrs. Wilson. I’m a married woman’. Even Fury looked impressed.” Bucky told Steve, metal fingers resting against Steve’s wrist-- and describing everyone’s escapades, including Peter and Gwen’s engagement, May Parker’s home for homeless Shatterdome vets, Bruce’s advancements in the health sciences, Tony’s attempts at cloning a duck-sized Kaiju and Fury’s resulting bitchface, the Young Avengers’ film crew… Steve marveled at how life had gone on without him.

“How did you survive?” Clint asked. “I mean, you were deep sea, dude, the pressure should have killed you.”

“Uh, would you believe me if I said I battled Death and he got so annoyed that he shot me back above ground?” Steve joked. Clint’s eyes widened. “It was worth a shot. No, uh, actually Thor’s  _ mom _ showed up out of the blue. Told me that Thor had told her he’d reinforced one of Howler’s feet as an extra escape pod. She told me he wanted to do the fingers, but there wasn’t a way to get down there. I have no idea why Thor thought he’d need an extra pod, but it existed.”

“You got lucky that you got so many people looking out for you,” Sam said, and Steve shook his head.

“Damn miracle,” he said.

 

* * *

 

“Did you tell him?” Natasha asked him, later, in the kitchen, as Beast wound herself around his ankles.

Steve glanced out to the living room, where Clint, Sam, and Bucky were in the midst of an angry game of Snap. “I told him at the bottom of the ocean,” Steve said. “He told me this morning.”

Natasha smiled. “No regrets, then.”

“Not one,” Steve grinned back at her, and reached down to pick up the cat. “I never imagined post-war life,” he admitted. “But this? I don’t think this is going to be too bad.”

Natasha smiled. Clint very loudly cursed and she rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go kick their asses.”

Steve grinned and stepped back into the living room, letting the door to the kitchen swing shut behind him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Come ask me about this verse!](http://citadelofswords.tumblr.com/ask) I really do want to work with it way more so please don't hesitate to come talk to me!


End file.
